The Desire for Revenge Can Be Strong and Overpowering

There is a lesson taken from reading Moby Dick.

Have you ever been wronged and wished you could punish the perceived offender? You are not the only one. This desire is wired within us.

For example, the Bible instructs us “an eye for an eye” to penalize an offender. But about 2,000 years later, Martin Luther King Jr. saw it differently: “The old law of ‘an eye for an eye’ leaves everybody blind.”

As much as we hate to admit it, revenge is one of those intense feelings that come up for most human beings.

Why do people seek revenge? What do they hope to accomplish?

Revenge is a powerful internal force. But revenge is counter-productive, reopening and aggravating emotional wounds. Because the person who feels wronged is angry and hurt, thinking revenge will somehow even the score, and take away the pain.

But revenge is far more destructive than the original offense. In the classic novel Moby Dick, Captain Ahab is obsessed with seeking revenge on the white whale, Moby Dick. His long effort results in the death and destruction of the entire crew except for the narrator Ishmael. Captain Ahab is caught in a harpoon line and is dragged down to his death by the whale.

Considering revenge is an innate human response to feeling slighted, but those who seek revenge are mistaken at predicting its outcome. We often believe that exacting revenge is a form of emotional release and that getting retribution will help us feel better. But it only perpetuates the cycle of conflict. Most strategies for revenge fail because they try to change the past. Even though the first you might feel rewarding, psychological scientists have found that instead of quenching hostility, revenge prolongs the original offense’s unpleasantness, and it often creates only a cycle of retaliation.

In short,

Avoiding the act of revenge allows to trivialize the event and makes it easier to forget and move on. But when we seek vengeance, we can no longer trivialize the situation. Instead, we obsess.

But what do you do if you were wronged?

Movies often portray the act of revenge as a way of gaining closure after a wrong. But in fact, satisfaction is fleeting.

Successful strategies for revenge aim far into the future and acknowledge that the cycle of vengeance and retaliation vortexes toward tragedy and best stopped before it starts. When the dark tendrils of revenge creep into the soul, it’s best to take that intensity and put it towards succeeding. Put it towards goals. Put it towards self-growth. This shifts the focus onto a mission and makes the subject of unhappiness irrelevant.

There is a lesson taken from reading Moby Dick; don’t become too obsessed with one goal: you exclude the more important things in life. The desire for revenge is strong and sometimes overpowering. But the logic about revenge is often twisted, conflicted, parochial, and dangerous. Revenge is a primitive, destructive, and violent response to anger, injury, or humiliation. It is a misguided attempt to transform hurt into rightness.

Thank you for reading. If you enjoyed it, you might also like some of my other thoughts. It will also help if you share with family and friends.

Henya is the author of the just-released suspense novel, Stolen Truth!

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